James Hilton: Collected Novels by James Hilton

Author:James Hilton
Language: eng
Format: epub

PART TWO

HE FOUND HIMSELF LYING on that park seat. He had opened his eyes to see clouds and drenched trees, and to feel the drops splashing on his face. After a while his position began to seem more and more odd, so he raised himself to a sitting angle, and was immediately aware of sodden clothes, stiff limbs, a terrific headache, and a man stooping over him. His first thought was that he must have been drunk the night before, but he soon rejected it, partly because he could not remember the night before at all, partly because he somehow did not think he was the sort of young man to have had that sort of night, but chiefly because of a growing interest in what the man stooping over him was saying. It was a kind of muttered chorus—“That’s right, mister—take it easy. Didn’t ’ardly touch yer—it was the wet roadway, you sort o’ slipped. Cheer up, mister, no bones broke—you’ll be all right—wouldn’t leave you ’ere, I wouldn’t, if I didn’t know you’d be all right. …”

Presently, suggested by the muttered chorus and supported by the fact that his clothes were not only sopping wet but also muddied and torn, another hypothesis occurred to him—that he had been run down by a car whose driver had brought him into the park and was now leaving him there.

But where? His brain refused an answer, and when pressed offered a jumble of memories connected only with war—shell fire for headaches, a smashed leg for stiffness, no man’s land for all the mud and rain in the world.

He stood up, feeling dizzy, swayed and almost fell. The man had gone, was now nowhere to be seen. Then he noticed he had been lying down on sheets of newspaper. He stooped to peel one off the seat, hoping it might afford some clue, but the top of the page that would have contained a name and date was an unreadable mush, and the rest was rapidly softening under the heavy rain. He peered at it, nevertheless, searching for some helpful word or phrase before the final disintegration. Most of the letterpress seemed to be news about floods and flood damage—rescues from swollen rivers, people stranded in upper floors, rowboats in streets, and so on.

Then suddenly his eyes caught a paragraph headed “Rainier Still in Germany”—one of those mock-cheerful items that tired sub-editors put in to fill an odd corner—something about soaked holiday crowds taking comfort from the thought that somebody somewhere was faring even worse.

Now it is curious how one’s own name, or the name of one’s home, or a word like “cancer,” will sometimes leap out of a page as if it were printed in red ink. It was like that for the young man as he staggered through the deserted park towards a gate he could see in the distance. Rainier Still in Germany—Rainier Still in Germany. It was a challenge, something he had to answer; and the answer came.

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